Online IT training company Pluralsight has agreed to acquire web-based programming tutorial outfit Code School for $36 million. And to celebrate, the two companies will offer free access to all the content on both sites for free for 72 hours.
It’s the latest twist in the growing “code literacy” market. The announcement follows news last week that San Francisco-based programming school Hack Reactor will acquire the similar, Austin-based school called MakerSquare.
Pluralsight has historically focused on selling training materials to companies or to well established technology professionals, while Code School has largely marketed its service to beginning programmers. Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard said that the company looked at several other players in the beginners tutorial market, including Codecademy and Treehouse, but thought that Code School had the best balance between entertaining video content and interactive tutorials.
Skonnard says Pluralsight may end up taking advantage of some of the technology that Code School has developed, such as its in-browser tools for writing iOS applications. But mostly the acquisition is about helping Pluralsight serve additional markets.
“Both companies are really complimentary,” Code School founder Gregg Pollack. says. “People could start learning on Code School than move into the massive library they have at Pluralsight.”
The two companies will also work together to help students decide which courses to take—and in what order to take them—to advance their careers, and to create an evaluation system to help students prove what they’ve learned.
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